Terrence Malick's ode to a martyr

A Hidden Life devotes itself to spellbinding imagery as it tells the simple story of a man who refused to serve in Hitler's army.

It's not always easy to tell what director Terrence Malick is driving at in A Hidden Life, his three-hour opus about what can happen when deep religious faith intersects with conscience. Taking his movie from an Edenic valley in upper Austria to a grim prison in Berlin, Malick tells the real-life story of Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl), a farmer who refused to serve in Hitler's army.

The Catholic Church already has honored Jagerstatter. In 2007, while still pope, Benedict XVI beatified Jagerstatter and declared him a martyr. Always ready to assert the mesmeric power of images, Malick treats Jagerstatter as if he already had been beatified. A Hidden Life isn't the story of an ordinary man who does something extraordinary; it's a reverie about a martyr. Jagerstatter's anti-Nazi stance led to his death by the guillotine in 1943.

Unlike in some of his movies, Malick (Tree of Life, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song) allows the movie to unfold in chronological order. But A Hidden Life remains an unmistakable Malick creation. At the outset, Malick bathes his characters in the hallowed light of pre-Anschluss rural Austria, creating a portrait of bucolic innocence.

Malick and cinematographer Jorg Widmer film the Austrian landscapes with reverence. The camera glides over rolling hills as if God were running a finger across the cheek of creation.

Malick, who wrote the screenplay, doesn't get too close to Jaegerstatter, presenting him as a man who embodies a way of life that's presented as if it were a nostalgia-tinged dream.

Early on, we get the idea of a world yet corrupted as Malick portrays life in the beautiful village of St. Radegund. Franz and his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) pick flowers, play with their three daughters, swing scythes in flowing fields and live in what you might call blessed harmony with the natural world.

Trouble, of course, looms. Jagerstatter soon must leave his village to receive army training. He returns home (possibly with a farmer's exemption) but as the war wears on, he's again called up.

The sticking point for Jagerstatter: He refuses to swear a required loyalty oath to Hitler and finds himself imprisoned. He's told he can serve as a medical orderly, providing he takes the oath. Even when offered a way out, he won't compromise.

The German officials in the film (aside from the brutal prison guards) try to convince Jagerstatter that his sacrifice will mean nothing. No one knows about him. Nothing will change because of what he's doing. The oath is just a bunch of words anyway. They'd rather not put him to death.

As Jagerstatter's imprisonment continues, he's beaten and abused. He prays. He suffers but insists that others surely have it worse.

All of this comes into sharp focus in a private meeting with the judge at Jagerstatter's trial (the late Bruno Ganz).

Diehl isn't given much to say, but he summarizes Jagerstatter's stance in a conversation with a bishop whose advice he seeks before his fateful decision. If God gave man free will, then man is responsible for his choices, says Jagerstatter. The religious figures in the movie provide little help, suggesting that Jagerstatter give Caesar his due and make the best of a bad situation.

At times, we hear Jagerstatter's thoughts or those of his devoted wife, whose interactions with increasingly hostile village neighbors, play counterpoint to scenes of Jagerstatter's imprisonment.

Little of the dialogue can match Malick's imagery. With Malick, though, it's not the words but the music; i.e., the visual environment, that matters. It's not what anyone says; it's what we see.

The use of multiple languages in A Hidden Life can be puzzling. Diehl and his wife speak and think in English. The Nazis mostly speak German. Maybe Malick saw this as a way to remove Jagerstatter from his social milieu, to make him a lone figure who belongs to no one or nothing, except possibly the land.

There have been objections to A Hidden Life, many of them focused on the film's insistence on avoiding depictions of the ravages of war or to deal -- even in passing -- with the fate of the Jews. Jagerstatter objects to the conquering of countries that have done nothing to Germany: He views Hitler as evil without referencing Hitler's greatest evil, the Holocaust.

Moreover, representatives of the state gave Jagerstatter an opportunity to save himself, an option available to no Jew.

Those are fair criticisms. But it's a mistake, I think, to look to Malick for moral prescriptions. To fully appreciate A Hidden Life, you have to allow yourself to experience the elevation that comes from the way Widmer's camera embraces the light, allowing it to become a kind of literal embodiment of spirit. Malik moves slowly because he wants us to live in this light, much as Jagerstatter does.

Beyond that, A Hidden Life devotes itself to the belief -- though perhaps naive -- that the actions of one righteous man matter as much as anything else in history.

I watched a much more down-to-earth version of Jagerstatter's story on YouTube, a black-and-white feature that includes interviews with people who knew him. Titled The Refusal, the movie doesn't approach the cinematic eloquence of A Hidden Life, but it examines how those around Jagerstatter reacted to him in ways that Malick's film ignores. It also sees Jagerstatter as more of a staunch Catholic than Malick does, a man who thought that joining an evil cause would destroy his soul.

Religion emphasis aside, it's possible to conclude from watching A Hidden Life that righteousness sometimes begins with a single individual who's willing to say "no." Malick also invites us to ponder what expressions of individual conscience mean when they can't change the corrupted world in which we find ourselves. A Hidden Life is no scream of outrage at the world’s madness, only a hushed refusal to go along with it when there's no certainty about the outcome.

A frustrating 'Knight of Cups'

Director Terrence Malick's journey through Los Angeles.

I know many serious film lovers who are slavishly devoted to the films of director Terrence Malick, so much so that they transfer the brilliance and emotional depth of films such as The Tree of Life to lesser works, notably the recent To the Wonder (2012).

With Knight of Cups, Malik provides another test for devotees because this strange foray into the libidinous world of Hollywood leaves a gaping maw of consternation in its wake.

Malick begins with a quote from The Pilgrim's Progress, a 1678 Christian allegory. Author John Bunyan's work about a journey to the Celestial City isn't the only source Malick quotes: He also cites passages from The Hymn of the Pearl, a Gnostic myth about a boy sent to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from a serpent.

I bring all this up not to demonstrate my knowledge of Christian literature, which is -- at best -- confined to perusals of Wikipedia, but to suggest that Malick's willful obscurity seems a frustratingly protracted exercise in navel gazing as filtered through what feels like a dense spiritual fog.

Equally troublesome is Malick's tendency to pepper his films with the barely audible thoughts of his characters. He blurs their speech and de-emphasizes anything resembling human connection. His characters live in worlds of their own.

This approach has been likened to dreams; but dreams and poetry always have been tricky stuff for movies, and they can do a filmmaker in as quickly as they can save him or her.

In Knight of Cups, Malick mostly abandons linear storytelling as he soaks in the often beautiful imagery of his collaborating cinematographer, three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki.

Taking its title from a tarot card, Knight of Cups casts the always adventurous Christian Bale as Rick, a screenwriter who's searching for meaning in his generally hollow life. Foundering in a sybaritic material world, Rick is a forsaken man.

When he's not engaged in sexual relationships, Rick is seen walking, driving his vintage convertible or looking at things. Of course, the gifted Lubezki gives Rick (and us) plenty at which to stare as Malick's camera explores Los Angeles.

Because most of Rick's quest (if that's what it is) involves women, Malick finds an opportunity to bring a diverse core of actresses to the screen.

Nancy (Cate Blanchett) plays Rick's ex-wife, a physician who works in a clinic. Karen (Teresa Palmer) appears as a Las Vegas stripper. Helen (Frieda Pinto) works as a model. Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) gets pregnant by Rick. She's married to someone else.

As if flipping through a deck of Tarot cards, Malick structures his story around chapter headings such as The Moon, The Hermit and more. It takes more effort than it's worth to connect these titles to the hazy unfolding of Malick's Los Angeles-based scenes, some which include Rick's father (Brian Dennehy) and his bother (Wes Bentley).

Father and son are locked in an explosively angry duet.

Antonio Banderas presides over a Hollywood party attended by various Hollywood "insiders," a boisterous Bacchanal.

At first, it seems as if Malick wants to make a movie about another lost soul snared by the siren call of Hollywood hedonism. But he also seems to want to give Rick's searchings spiritual meaning: A lost soul, Rick is separated from God and trying to establish a connection or maybe he's just seeking meaning in a godless world or maybe ...

Well, in the end, who really cares what Rick is seeking?

We've all got troubles of our own, and Malick never convinces us (or at least me) that we should get involved with his.

Malick's 'Tree of Life' grows to greatness

Terrence Malick has another movie in the works, but it's difficult to imagine that he'll top Tree of Life.

Beginning with 1973’s Badlands, Terrence Malick has released only five features.* Malick, who has both troubled and inspired critics, currently has a movie in post-production, which feels odd because Malick's The Tree of Life -- now moving around the country -- serves as a kind of grand, sometimes inscrutable summation of one of the strangest careers in movies.

Whatever else can be said about the 67-year-old Malick, it’s clear that he insists on charting his own course. With The Tree of Life, he tries for a movie that embraces both the intimate and cosmic, wondering out loud whether there’s any connection between the two.

Not surprisingly, the movie’s intimate scenes involve family. With help from a perfectly cast Brad Pitt, Tree of Life captures the dictatorial authority of a 1950s father better than any movie I’ve seen. On the cosmic side, the movie includes special effects sequences about the creation of the world and the evolution of life, even making room for what appear to be CGI dinosaurs that look as if they’ve wandered in from some wayward summer blockbuster.

In other hands, Tree of Life might have come off as a cockeyed, reeling mess. In Malick’s hands, it becomes something elevated and sorrowful, a movie that captures the mournful sweep of time.

The bulk of the movie revolves around a Texas family in which Pitt plays the patriarch. Through the course of many domestic vignettes set in the 1950s, Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien emerges as a disciplined failure, a father who wants to harden his two sons against the disappointments of an unforgiving world.

The boys’ mother (Jessica Chastain) is softer, bringing hints of grace and relief into the lives of her boys.

It’s important to know that these pivotal characters are not caricatures; they’re shaded and drawn in ways that allow for nuances and gray areas.

Having grown up in the 1950s, I can’t say that Malick offers a comprehensive depiction of the period. He has, however, found an essential truth about it, a sense of longing and pain that must have been dredged from memories of Malick's own Texas youth.

These “memory” segments memorialize the past without nostalgia, as Malick finds a tone that mixes emotion and detachment.

The story, such as it is, begins with the death of one of the O'Brien sons at age 19. Did he die in a war? A car accident? Malick never says. But the young man’s death establishes a mood of grief that hangs over the rest of the movie – not only for this lost son, but also for the great army of the dead that has preceded all of us.

Beautifully played by Hunter McCracken, young Jack – the oldest of the O’Brien sons -- becomes the central figure in the movie's '50s-based scenes. Sean Penn provides counterpoint in scenes set much later. Penn plays Jack as an adult, an architect whose memories invade the brittle modernity of the environments in which he operates.

I can’t say that the segments involving Penn (including a depiction of a reconciling moment in the afterlife) work. And Tree of Life surely can be picked at. Of course, the birth-of-the-universe scenes evoke the chilly grandeur of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's also possible that Malick’s vision to end all visions isn’t especially well thought-out. I’m not sure that the movie’s two-hour and 18-minute running time couldn’t have been shortened without damage to the overall enterprise.

But it’s best to take The Tree of Life in its strange entirety, to respect its ambitions and cherish its achievements, even as we strain to hear what the characters are saying when they whisper to God, wondering where He is. Quiet thoughts are projected toward an unseen and unresponsive vastness. It’s as if every life amounts to a whispered question that always remains unanswered.

I don’t totally understand Malick’s spirituality. Maybe he doesn’t understand it, either. He sees a world of oppositional forces represented by nature and grace. But whatever drives Malick leads him to a movie that seems to risk everything.

Malick takes the broadest possible aim, yet here's something deeply personal about Tree of Life, a humanity that's reflected in the way we hold the fragments of memory that make up a life. Dad played classical piano. At one point, Dad took a long and mysterious trip. When he departed, it felt to his sons as if a country had been liberated. An incident with the younger O'Brien brother and a BB gun lingers as a source of guilt for Jack. And on and on, snapshots from some recurrent dream.

The only other filmmaker I know who has attempted this kind of somber reflection is another Terrence, British director Terrence Davies. I thought about Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives while watching Malick’s more expansive movie. Both are attempts to salvage the past or maybe just to review it as part of some restless search that resists definition, as if we can't help watching our own movie.

With the exception of The New World, I've liked all of Malick's movies. Maybe I’ll see that one again. Perhaps I’ll reconsider. I definitely will see The Tree of Life again – not because I think I’ll figure it out on second viewing, but because I want to re-experience its nobility and sadness.

I understand those who view Malick's efforts as a spectacular form of self-indulgence, but in Tree of Life, I joined him for worship at the church of cinema. Think of Tree of Life as a beautifully somber cathedral with a ceiling that reaches toward infinity and stained glass windows made of memory.

*Terrence Malick's Features: The Tree of Life (2011), The New World (2005), The Thin Red Line (1998), Days of Heaven (1978), and Badlands (1973)